![]() In 1983, African American Historian of Religions Charles Long reiterated his long-standing challenge to the Western academy to understand the entire postcolonial situation as an intercultural. View full-textīeyond necessary personal confession and committed political action, confrontation and transformation of white “race-work” requires serious theoretical interrogation of the ways and wiles of whiteness. It argues for a more sociologically nuanced and historically grounded view of Gandhi in the historical comparative perspective of modern independence struggles, civil society formation and nation-making. The article critiques predominant arguments that Gandhi was an ‘anti-modern’, whether in a heroic ‘post-modern’ posture or as an enemy of ‘scientific modernity’. This transformation belongs to a broader re-evaluation of Enlightenment in terms of growth over final ends, held in common with thinkers such as John Dewey. The essay contends that Gandhi, far from merely an heir to the Enlightenment tradition, also radically challenged, expanded and transformed it. based on the philosophy and practice of non-violence. Practically, this concerns the French Revolutionary heritage as a paradigm of political action, and Gandhian innovations in terms of mass movements. Gandhi's political contribution to the Enlightenment heritage is assessed in terms of values, epistemology and practice. This essay re-examines the democratic Enlightenment as a multi-dimensional, heterogeneous, non-Eurocentric and living heritage. Magical beliefs are a hindrance to political action and to collective development. Witchcraft and occultism threaten to hold them back, to derail the progressive process. Eschewing a ‘permanent confrontation on the phantasmic plane’ that hinders the revolutionary process, Fanon says, the people must turn their attention to more pressing matters (ibid.). Like the sense of inferiority that accompanies interactions with the settler’s whiteness and the traumas of the ‘native intellectual’ who must discover the shared humanity beyond Enlightenment individualism, casting off the bonds of traditional magic and witchcraft is fundamental for the process of decolonisation. It has always happened in the struggle for freedom that such a people, formerly lost in an imaginary maze, a prey to unspeakable terrors yet happy to lose themselves in a dreamlike torment, such a people becomes unhinged, reorganizes itself, and in blood and tears gives birth to very real and immediate action. This world of magic is yet another restraint that the colonised subject must escape from: Occult beliefs, he says, contain and displace the native’s murderous rage against colonial masters and are a method of communal identity creation. ![]() There is a brief passage in Frantz Fanon’s ‘Concerning Violence’ in which he discusses the relevance of occult superstitions to the colonised native, describing them as mechanisms for disavowal of the coloniser’s power, creating a narrative in which the subjugation of the colonised person is blamed on supernatural forces rather than on white domination.
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